THE JESUIT CONTRIBUTION TO ORIENTAL INFLUENCE ON EUROPEAN GARDENS

Jesuits were the first Europeans to live in China and to visit extensively gardens, conveying to Western Europe information on Chinese garden art. Their descriptions had a lasting impact on European garden design. When Jesuit descriptions of Chinese gardens reached Europe, England was debating a new design that apparently showed similarities to what the Jesuits had observed in China because it favored natural forms and displayed a composite approach. The awareness of the presence of intriguingly informal gardens in China favored the diffusion of the English garden through Europe in the second half of the XVIII^th century. In France especially, emphasis on picturesque and exotic features, inspired to the descriptions sent by Jesuits, led to a hybrid form of garden, which was called Chinois or Anglo-chinois because it looked strikingly exotic though distinctively Anglo-Saxon. This paper will focus on XVII^th and XVIII^th centuries’ printed sources in European languages, reporting descriptions on Chinese gardens by Jesuits. These descriptions increased the European awareness of Chinese garden design and had a seminal role in engendering a novel type of garden inspired by natural scenery. Jesuits commented mostly on the irregularity of the arrangements they found in garden design. They detailed the specific scenes, vistas, and pavilions that gave Chinese gardens their atmosphere, and reported on the artistic manipulation of elements borrowed from the landscape. The attraction for an artificial nature, expressed in Chinese garden art and reported by Jesuits, matched the prevailing rococo taste in Europe. Such descriptions contributed to accentuate the exotic, curious, bizarre characteristics of the English landscape garden as it spread over the continent, where it was enriched with a proliferation of grottos, rocailles, and pavilions. Jesuit descriptions of Chinese gardens played a part in specifying the assortment of scenes that appeared in picturesque gardens.